Claire Cain Miller and Vindu Goel report: Google, following in Facebook’s footsteps, wants to sell users’ endorsements to marketers to help them hawk their wares. On Friday, Google announced an update to its terms of service that allows the company to include adult users’ names, photos and comments in ads shown across the Web, based…
Category: Business
Google Demands Review of Wiretap Law Before Gmail Trial
William Dotinga reports: Google asked a federal judge Wednesday for permission to take questions about federal wiretapping laws to the 9th Circuit before a Gmail class action advances any further. […] [Judge Lucy] Koh [had] declined to dismiss the majority of the sprawling class action, finding that Gmail’s interceptions fall outside the narrow “ordinary course of business”…
Wal-Mart Prevails in Credit Card Class Battle Over Practice of Collecting Addresses and Phone Numbers
Julian Perlman writes: In a victory for Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., a federal district court judge has refused to certify a Rule 23(b)(3) class in a lawsuit for violation of California’s Song-Beverly Credit Card Act (Cal. Civ. Code § 1747 et seq., available here. Plaintiff Joel Leebove brought suit on behalf of himself and others similarly situated…
Lavabit Files Opening Brief in Landmark Privacy Case
Kevin Poulsen reports: Secure e-mail provider Lavabit just filed the opening brief in its appeal of a court order demanding it turn over the private SSL keys that protected all web traffic to the site. The government proposed to examine and copy Lavabit’s most sensitive, closely guarded records–its private keys–despite the fact that those keys…